It looks like of late I have been filling in gaps of 80s movies that it seems like every halfway decent nerd or geek of my generation has seen but I somehow have missed. That means I recently finally got around to seeing the original Highlander where a Frenchman played an immortal Scotsman and a Scotsman played an even older, immortal Spaniard.
Or so I thought. It turned out Sean Connery actually played an immortal Egyptian that passed himself off as a Spaniard and carried a Japanese sword. Big difference.
Christopher Lambert stars as Connor MacLeod, an immortal Scotsman, and Wikipedia tells me I am further wrong in that Lambert was actually born in New York City. That doesn’t stop him from being known as a French actor or having a French accent, but he’s originally from the United States from the looks of things. It doesn’t much matter. He was one of those somewhat wooden guys that got tossed into a lot of movies like this, but he’s got more screen presence than Miles O’Keeffe, so there’s that.
It occurs to me this review is turning very disjointed very quickly, and I won’t even deny that’s happening. Then again, the movie I’m writing about goes a little all over the place, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Anyway, Connor is an immortal Scotsman who, in the opening minutes, leaves a pro-wrestling match to get into a sword fight in the parking garage. It ends with the other guy beheaded and a surge of energy hitting Connor that starts the cars, unspools a fire hose, sets off the sprinklers, and a makes electrical lights explode in a manner that I’m sure was never meant to be sexual in the slightest. Nope. Not at all.
Basically, Connor has been roaming the Earth for centuries since he died on the battlefield in Renaissance Fair Scotland, and he’s one of a group of immortals that can only die when they are beheaded by one of their own. Eventually, there will be “only one” and for the sake of the human race, it better be one of the benevolent ones. Since there aren’t many left, Connor needs to worry about the Kurgan (Clancy Brown), a rather murderous guy who looked like an 80s biker villain even in the sixteenth century. In the present, or at least 1986, Connor romances a police forensics expert, cares for an adopted daughter he once rescued from the Nazis, and goes about his business while never aging. In the past, after being driven from his home village, he had a sweet relationship with a mortal woman when not being trained by Ramirez (Connery in total paycheck mode for what amounts to basically a cameo).
As it is, Highlander is one of those movies with an interesting concept that basically doesn’t add up to much in execution. Lambert is not a particularly interesting lead actor. The special effects, when they don’t look like something off a heavy metal album cover, aren’t great, and even when they do look like something off a heavy metal album cover, they aren’t great. Connor’s Medieval wife dies of old age, and the make-up on that actress is just, well, bad. Then again, when I saw the Canon company logo at the start of the movie, I wasn’t expecting anything that looked like it had a real budget behind it.
That said, there are two saving graces to Highlander. True, the premise is intriguing even if it isn’t realized very well, but that isn’t enough. Instead, there was a good soundtrack of songs from Queen, and somehow I think Clancy Brown just got how ridiculous this movie was. He’s a giant of a man next to everybody, but at one point, he literally pops up next to people from maybe a foot away as if he was crouched on the ground next to them and they didn’t see him. He’s chewing scenery with gusto, the very epitome of an 80s villain in a bad 80s sci-fi/fantasy movie. That he is today the voice of Spongebob’s pal Mr. Krabs and a steady presence in a lot of genre TV is a testament to how good he can be with material others might find silly. Here, well, he’s at least having fun playing a villain, and someone should look like they’re having fun in a movie where immortal swordsmen run around decapitating each other. An over-the-top villain and some tunes on the soundtrack can go a long way.
Grade: C
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